The moral lessons of The Hobbit

After having defended Peter Jackson’s Hobbit from some of its most common critiques, I shall now turn to some of the things I enjoyed the most about the movie. Most of these come from Tolkien’s Hobbit, but again, just because a story sounds good in one mode does not automatically mean that it will “click” when told in a different mode.

The great challenge in a visual depiction of the Quest of Erebor is this: this is an event on a much smaller scale than the War of the Ring. For viewers who are looking for epic set-piece battles (or as a little birdie put it to me, for those “who don't necessarily share the love for the books and just walked in to see Orlando Bloom buckle his swash”), there really isn’t anything in the Quest of Erebor that provides this, except for the climactic Battle of the Five Armies. Even the One Ring, which is mildly important for the War of the Ring, plays a minor role here. Its importance wasn’t even recognized by most people at the time of the Quest!

But as Tolkien repeatedly tells us, small does not have to mean insignificant, and this applies to everything, from the hobbits to the Quest itself. 

A fanboy defends The Hobbit

Anybody who knows me knows of my obsession with John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s legendarium. This is not the place to enumerate the reasons for my obsession. My goal is far narrower: to explain why I loved Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

The Critiques
In good Indic fashion, I begin with the pūrvapakṣa, the opponent(s’|’s) view. A number of criticisms have been leveled against Peter Jackson’s Hobbit enterprise. At the root of many of them is his decision to split the original book into three three-hour films, only one of which has been released so far. (His Lord of the Rings runs close to twelve hours, but then it covers nearly a thousand pages of text.) This opened him up to criticism from multiple directions, even before the movie came out:

• that his motivation is purely financial; that, since fanboys of Tolkien are going to watch whatever he serves up, why not make three times as much money by making three movies?
• that the original story is far too thin to support nine hours of film, which will force him to draw out some scenes interminably and possibly to add extra plotlines
• that his intended demographic is no longer the demographic that Tolkien targeted with his original book

I made some of these criticisms myself, while also recognizing (only slightly ruefully) that I fall squarely into Jackson’s target “sucker fanboy” demographic.

Now that “Episode I” is out, critics have duly rehashed all these critiques. They claim that the movie plods along interminably; that it should really have been trimmed down to 100 minutes (which would have the added benefit of making it more accessible to children); that a number of changes have been made to the plotline that simply make no sense other than adding screentime (stone giants! Jar-Jar Binks, I mean, Radagast!), and so on. They have also made two additional critiques:

• that the movie is far more violent than the book, and thus violates Tolkien’s vision (among other things)
• that the story has been changed fundamentally, in ways that are completely unnecessary (in particular, referring to the alteration of the Battle of Azanulbizar and the survival of Azog)

My Response
I loved every minute of the movie. There wasn’t a single instant when I was bored. Part of this is certainly because I’m a fanboy, but I also didn’t go in expecting to love it. Frankly, after having all these criticisms, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I loved it because of Jackson’s decisions, because of what he had added, and because of the changes he had come up with. Part of this post is me trying to reason out why these things matter to me, but not to other critics, fans, and critic-fans. I suspect at least part of this is that I explicitly hold the following view, which some of these critics may reject:

Peter Jackson’s Hobbit is not Tolkien’s Hobbit. And that is an entirely good thing.

Kultur und Kampf

This BBC article by philosopher John Gray begins with an autosummary: “Culture thrives on conflict and antagonism, not social harmony.” It then quotes the character Harry Lime from The Third Man:

In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Provocative, but clearly false, as Gray himself admits. It wasn’t the violence of the Borgias that produced great art, but their patronage. (To what extent their patronage of the arts was a consequence of their murderous regime is harder to analyze.) There have been reigns of violence that have produced no art of great consequence—think of Mafia-dominated lands, or of the devastation of Khorasan by the Mongol armies. It’s clear that the link between great cultural products and violence is not as obvious as Lime (or Gray) claims.

But that’s not the most interesting part of this article—after all, Gray himself chooses to back off from Lime’s rhetoric after using it as a hook to draw people in. Rather, what is interesting is Gray’s conclusion: “Culture thrives on contestation and antagonism, not some dreary fantasy of social harmony.”

However, this “conclusion” is not warranted by Gray’s arguments. What looks like a careful argument is in fact a reinforcement of an old myth. Gray’s vision of culture as the cream bubbling atop a writhing, churning, chaotic conflict parallels the stereotypical picture of a lonely artist whose whole œuvre is a cri de cœur that pierces society’s carefully constructed façade. Both of these ideas are Romantic myths. And like all powerful myths they possess a kernel of truth and have deep roots extending into Greek culture: the Promethean myth of a man stealing primordial technology from the gods, and the notion of the agon, the contest in which two men struggled with each other, physically and mentally, for victory. The Greek conception of debate as agonistic and the Greek idea of (technological?) progress as something achieved by an act of violence have survived down to this day in myths such as the one Gray sketches out here. (I realized I’m treating the Greeks superficially here, and know that Greek culture was more complex than this.)

The reason I call this a myth is because Indic and Chinese civilizations (at least what little I know of the latter) take very different approaches to the question of whether culture emerges from conflict or harmony. Again, the point is not that culture can or cannot arise out of conflict—it is clear that it does sometimes, and it doesn’t on other occasions—but rather that “civilizations” have different attitudes towards the relationship between culture and conflict, and hold different myths dear to themselves that influence their perceptions of the world.

The Chinese case is rather interesting. The Hundred Schools of Thought flowered during the Warring States period when the political scene was a bloody mess, and it may in fact be possible to argue that at least some intellectual developments were in direct response to the chaos. Nevertheless, it is my limited understanding that Chinese philosophers have not normally followed a confrontational model of debate. Furthermore, the Tang and Song courts witnessed the flowering of Chinese art, literature, and philosophy (well, at least of the Neo-Confucian persuasion), and these were largely in response to sustained courtly patronage of these pursuits. But regardless of what the political scene was like, the story told is one of harmony, both within the individual and at the social level.

The Indic case also differs from the Western one. While Indic philosophy does parallel the Greek in largely following an agonistic model, the worldviews of the literati typically sought out harmony and resolution. The rasa theorists saw artistic appreciation as evoking stable emotional states in an appropriately receptive audience, and at least some theorists (Abhinavagupta? I’m rusty on this) thought that the different rasas were all underpinned by the śānta-rasa, a state of calm or repose. Again, I’m not claiming that the conflict model is invalid here, only that the ultimate emphasis of the Indic system is rather different. 

The same is also true of those works of Indic authors that may have had political messages that we may not be receptive to today (such as Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa), where too an ultimately harmonious relationship between ruler and universe, between text and context, is envisioned and enacted. To the extent that generalizations can be valid, it can be generally stated that Indic authors largely saw themselves as working in harmony with their tradition, and saw the purpose of their works not as critiques of their societies but rather as representations of it that would harmonize it with the vision of the ideal society that Indic intellectuals held. (At some point in the future, I shall try to stretch this point into a discussion of Bollywood.)

Ultimately, the point is not that Gray is right or wrong: it is that he remains within the bounds of a particular myth that is not universally accepted or acceptable. Other civilizations have looked at similar events and processes and drawn very different lessons from them, which have shaped their attitudes towards the world and their cultural products in very different ways. Vive la différence!

“Albion’s Seed”: Notions of liberty in the US

The eminent American historian David Hackett Fischer has written colossal tomes that are daunting to even look at. His classic Albion’s Seed makes the argument at great length that modern American culture has been fundamentally shaped by four successive waves of migrations from different parts of the British Isles. These migrations brought with them their own distinct “folkways”, which took root in particular parts of the (eastern) United States and in particular strata of society. The book is vast, but this excerpt from the book contains short summaries of the ways in which the four folkways differed on the notion of liberty. I shall summarize the four summaries here so as not to overtax my poor brain.

In Fischer’s own words:

These four groups shared many qualities in common. All of them spoke the English language. Nearly all were British Protestants. Most lived under British laws and took pride in possessing British liberties. At the same time, they also differed from one another in many other ways: in their religious denominations, social ranks, historical generations, and also in the British regions from whence they came. They carried across the Atlantic four different sets of British folkways which became the basis of regional cultures in the New World. 

The first of the migrations was that of the Puritans, from eastern England to Massachusetts in the early 17th century. Their folkway was marked by what Fischer calls “ordered liberty”, and indeed used the word “liberty” to refer to four different ideas:

• collective liberty: the ability of a community to make its own decisions
• individual liberties: particular rights granted to individuals or groups that liberated them from otherwise binding constraints
• “soul liberty”: the “freedom to order one’s own acts in a godly way—but not in any other”.
• “freedom from the tyranny of circumstance”: guaranteeing everybody some level of protection from the worst that life could throw at them

The second migration, almost contemporaneous with the first, was that of a Royalist élite from southern  England to Virginia, who were accompanied by a large group of indentured servants. The most common notion of liberty here was a sort of “hegemonic liberty” that was available only to free-born Englishmen, which gave them not just dominion over themselves but also over others. It was thus possible to reconcile ideas of liberty with the practice of slavery in such parts.

The third was that of the Quakers from the northern Midlands of England to the mid-Atlantic, particularly around the Philadelphia area. This was a later migration than that of the Puritans, and thus exhibited a very different understanding of liberty. For the Quakers, what mattered most was “reciprocal liberty” that rested on their deep faith in “liberty of conscience”. As the Quakers had suffered greatly in England for their faith, they were willing to use the power of government to establish religious liberties in their communities in the Americas so as to prevent such tyranny from arising again. Their principle of reciprocity—fundamentally different from the Virginian Royalists’ hierarchical, hegemonic liberty—drew inspiration from the Christian Golden Rule. 

The fourth migration was that of the Scots-Irish (which seems a little bit too much of a catch-all to me, but then again I know nothing of this stuff), who came from different borderlands of Great Britain: the border between England and Scotland, the border between Northern Ireland and what is today the Republic of Ireland, and so on. These regions of the British Isles did not have strong centralized institutions, and the people living there were accustomed to “anarchic violence”. It was thus “natural” for them to bring to the Americas an abiding love of “natural liberty” accompanied by a deep mistrust of cultural outsiders. 

On freedom, choice(s), and democracy

Snowed in, I spent all of today reading a very interesting book by Prof. Loren J. Samons II of Boston University, with a very provocative thesis. The book's not-so-subtle title, What's Wrong with Democracy? From Athenian Practice to American Worship, belies its careful argument. Although the bulk of the book involves a close study of historical sources in order to examine the actual practices of the government of the Athenian polis, the author's overarching motivation is not the reassessment of contemporary perceptions of a long-extinct society merely for the sake of historical understanding. His point, rather, is to 

"present and foster criticism of modern democracy … [that is] aimed at the philosophical foundations of democracy, the popular conception of democracy, the practice of representative government through democratic elections, and the social and intellectual environment generated by democratic thought and practice in contemporary America" (p. 1). 

I hesitate to offer a summary of the book for fear of oversimplifying its complex, historically sensitive argument. Very crudely put, Prof. Samons: 

British architecture, urban planning, and decay

This is a powerful, hard-hitting essay by Theodore Dalrymple at the City Journal, describing the post-WWII destruction of Britain's stunning architectural heritage by urban planners who were high on Modernism and Brutalism and a whole lot of other "isms"s that promised utopias and kinda sorta underdelivered. Dalrymple uses his pen like a fine sword to slice and dice and skewer the grand plans of the postbellum planners. Worth reading in its entirety, but here are some quotable quotes.

On the energy with which post-war planners approached the reorganization of British cities:

"The Luftwaffe had been bungling amateurs, it turned out, compared with the town and city fathers of Britain. The Germans managed to destroy a few cities—though none utterly beyond repair, if a will to repair had existed—but the local authorities ruined practically everything, with a thoroughness that would have been admirable in a good cause."

On the typical attitudes of the planners towards the people, and on their opinion of themselves (this point is repeatedly made in James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State):

"Intellectuals viewed British towns and cities as the antithesis of planning: like Topsy, they just growed. It didn’t occur to the intellectuals that these were places where successive generations, over many centuries, had produced an urban environment that had charm and was intensely social and livable, largely because those who built it had to live in what they built … [A]s rational men, the planners knew what people needed: roads and parking lots, so that they might conveniently get to and make use of their shopping and cultural centers."

A hilarious description of one such "successful" modernization project, the replacement of the library of Birmingham with a modern design:

"[T]he magnificent Victorian library of 1866 [was] pulled down in 1974 and replaced with an inverted concrete ziggurat of such ugliness and (now) dilapidation that it defies description, at least by me. Its environs serve now as a giant pissoir and, at night, as a safe haven for drunks and rapists; and thus the Albert Speers of Britain have converted the Victorian dream of municipal munificence into the nightmare of administered anomie."

Writing about the most recent architectural phase in Britain, Dalrymple notes first that people throughout the country have woken up to the necessity of protecting their architectural heritage, and that the new generation of architects is less drunk on the intoxicating wines of "ism"s, but then goes on to note:

"With few exceptions, no contemporary British architect believes that he builds sub specie aeternitatis; on the contrary, he expects what he constructs to be pulled down soon and replaced. That a building should be sound enough to last perhaps 30 years is the city council’s main demand, which is conducive neither to solidity nor to fine workmanship."

A remarkable essay, and worth reading in full, and absorbing.

History, fiction, myth, narrative, social science, et cetera

Note: I began writing this post a while ago, and then forgot about it. I figured I'd post it for now, with the enormous caveat that it's a very very rough draft written very very long ago. I need to continue thinking hard about these issues.

I've been reading a number of articles by Hayden White recently, which have gotten me thinking once again about a question that I pondered about, piecemeal, a while ago: What are the relationships that bind fiction, history, and myth together? In particular, four of his articles really got my attention: "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" [1], "Interpretation in History" [2], "The Rhetoric of Interpretation" [3], and "The Question of Narrative in Contemporary Historical Theory" [4].

To superficially summarize my superficial readings of White: to value the form as well as the content, as White wants us to do, is not the same as insisting that the form is in fact the content. White's point, as the title of one of his books amply illustrates, is that the form of a historical work itself has content, and that the content of the form is distinct from the content of the work. To put it differently, a text comprises of a content and a form (setting aside questions about context for now); the content is often heavily governed by structures that may or may not be culture-specific; the form possesses an additional level of content that is related to the content of the text in a complicated fashion. Furthermore, this form has a history of its own, independent of the history of the content of the work or of the history being narrated in the content of the work; and this is intimately connected to the literary production of the particular culture and social setting in which this work came to be written.

States and "legibility"

I read a wonderful book by James C. Scott this summer, with the impressively long title Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. The book is about a lot of different things, and is difficult to summarize into one sentence, but if I simply had to do it I'd say: "The book is an examination of the systematic erosion of locally-generated, locally-relevant, practical knowledge by states over the course of time, and provides sobering historical accounts of particular schemes where human beings went too far with their efforts to superimpose a grand order from above."

Not all such efforts were entirely "bad", of course. The metric system, for instance, superseded a staggeringly diverse variety of measurement systems, each of which was relevant and usable only within a tiny locality. Undoubtedly it's far more difficult for humans to relate to an abstract measure of length like a metre than to a concrete measure like an armspan. But at the same time, this also makes trade and communication harder, especially over large distances. The metric system, imposed top-down, is equally abstract in all places and thus far more suitable for enabling trade.

But there were other cases in which such top-down efforts were not so benign in their unintended consequences. 

Natural versus artificial

This is a truly great article (yes, I occasionally read Esquire for the articles, and no, you may not parse that any way you like!) by Tom Junod on humans and ants. What I love most is the manner in which the author elevates his personal experiences in a house infested by Argentine ants to the level of a cosmic struggle (which, admittedly, it must be for him and his family), and in doing so, casts light upon the unilluminated corners of our musings on society, complexity, and consciousness. In brief, the author points out that "[E.O. Wilson's The Superorganism] proposes that what an ant colony possesses is a kind of accumulated intelligence, the result of individual ants carrying out specialized tasks and giving one another constant feedback about what they find as they do so."

This kind of emergent complexity means that the ant colony as a whole is infinitely more intelligent than any single ant, or even a small collection of ants. The whole in this case truly is bigger than the sum of its parts, and no mereological reductionism can explain precisely "where" the "intelligence" of the ant colony resides. This is the kind of thing that makes me question naïvely reductionist theories of consciousness even when applied to the human mind.

Douglas Hofstadter's awesome Gödel, Escher, Bach has an excellent interlude called, if I remember correctly, "Ant Fugue." It deals with precisely the same situation, and indeed Hofstadter uses this as a way to argue for his own perspective on complexity and consciousness. But for now, another pretty cool excerpt from Junod:

The worst part about discovering that the ants in your house are actually emissaries of the enormous teeming brain in your backyard — is that it worsens the other worst parts, of which there are many. For example, I have found ants in my underwear. Lots of them, which I didn't find until I put the underwear on. As a person who has had ants in his underwear, however, I have to say that what makes their presence particularly irksome is not the momentary discomfort but rather the knowledge of why they're there. They're not just passing through, you see, on their way to somewhere else. They're not in your underwear by accident. They're nation-building. They're extending the range of their civilization, and they're doing it in your drawers.

Speaking of which, Abstruse Goose has a very insightful point to make on the distinction between "natural" and "artificial".

"The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier"

I really enjoyed reading Richard Eaton's The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier. It is a fairly short book, at least by academic standards and certainly given the vast scope of the topic. For Eaton tries (fairly convincingly, I thought!) to answer a huge question: how did Islam take root so deeply and so (relatively) quickly in Bengal? [I should note that I don't currently have the book on me and so am writing this from memory, without citations.]

The question is definitely worth asking. As Eaton points out, Bengalis constitute the second-largest ethnic population of Muslims in the world, after Arabs. ("Indonesian", and "Bangladeshi", are nationalities, not ethnicities.) But Islam has been present in some parts of Bengal for less than 500 years. How did it so thoroughly become part of the landscape?

Eaton organizes his investigation around the concept of the frontier: the dividing line, the boundary between two domains that vary in a certain way. In the case of Bengal, he posits the existence of three different types of frontiers that intersected and interacted in fascinating ways: geographical, cultural, and political. With regard to the particular timespan he looks at, this manifests in the form of four different frontiers: the line that divides settled agriculture from forest; the line that separates Sanskrit(ized) civilization from non-Sanskrit(ized) civilization; the line between Islamic and non-Islamic civilization; and the line that divides Turko-Afghan (Islamic) political dispensations from the "Wild East".

Eaton tackles four of the most common theories about the Islam(ic)ization of Bengal, and discusses why each of them fails to explain the situation in its entirety. These theories are (I don't remember the exact names Eaton gives these theories):

• The Immigration theory: often espoused by the Muslim ashraf élite, and of particular interest to those who supported the creation of Pakistan, this posited that the Muslims of Bengal were non-Bengalis who immigrated from Central Asia or Arabia to the region.
• I'd like to know where you'd find a hundred million Central Asians who somehow migrated across the Indo-Gangetic plains, leaving no traces anywhere! This theory simply cannot explain the adoption of Islam by enormous swathes of the agrarian and artisanal classes.
• The Patronage theory: according to this, the people of Bengal converted to take advantage of the superior patronage afforded to Muslims over Hindus by the Muslim political dispensations that governed the region for five hundred years.
• Eaton notes that although Mughal and pre-Mughal rulers did offer more concessions to Muslims than to Hindus, there was absolutely nothing in early and middle Mughal administration that suggested that the empire saw it as its mission to convert people to Islam.
• Furthermore, this does not explain the vast difference in the rate of adoption of Islam between Delhi and Dhaka; surely whatever patronage one could gain by becoming Muslim would be even more concentrated in the heart of the empire than on the frontiers! This too cannot explain the vast scale of conversion.
• The Sword theory: a favorite of the Hindu right-wing and of some colonizing Orientialists with their own axes to grind, this is the age-old claim that Muslims converted vast populations under threat of execution.
• This is so deeply biased and flawed that I don't know where to start.
• It ignores the basic theological problem that you cannot become a Muslim under duress.
• It ignores historical facts about conversion from Spain to Iran (all through the region, it took hundreds of years before the majority of the population converted to Islam).
• It ignores the particular geographic distribution of Hindu and Muslim populations in Bengal.
• And finally, it cannot explain why, if conversion by the scimitar was indeed the case, Delhi was probably 80% Hindu in 1947.
• The Emancipation theory: popular within a few different circles (Muslims justifying the two-nation theory, Hindus of various castes arguing for against the caste system, British colonizers and Orientalists, etc.), this argues that Islam uniquely offered a liberating escape from the crushing shackles of the Hindu caste system.
• Unlike the other three theories, this has the "virtue" of at least pretending to address the question of the sheer extent of Islamization in Bengal. At least at first glance, it's plausible that Bengali peasants, in a collective act of rebellion against the evils of the Hindu caste system, decided to convert en masse to socially egalitarian Islam. This too, however, fails to explain the matter.
• For one, there is no evidence that oppression of the peasantry was that much worse in Bengal than, say, in South India (or, for that matter, that the Bengali peasant is somehow that much more capable of carrying out a collective f***-you in this fashion).
• More interestingly, Eaton shows that the areas with the deepest levels of adoption of Islam in Bengal all lie beyond the Sanskritic frontier, in places where there was little to no social stratification—in other words, not only is it not true that Bengali peasants converted to "escape" the caste system, but in fact Hindu-ized peasants were less likely to convert to Islam after all!

Eaton acknowledges that each of these theories may explain a few aspects of the spread of Islam, but points out that they cannot explain the situation in Bengal individually and collectively. Eaton's own explanation combines the ideas of the frontiers to come up with an answer.

• Geographically, the forces of nature have played a hugely important role in encouraging eastward migration. As the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta—perhaps the most fertile soil on earth—shifts eastwards, the soils on the east gain in fertility while the western regions show lower collectivity. There is, in other words, a general tendency for cultivators to migrate eastwards, converting dense jungle to green paddy fields.
• Culturally:
• Sanskritic civilization, in its competing Brahminical and Buddhist forms, showed a general eastward tendency right from Vedic times. Enormous work has been done on Vedic, Sanskrit, and Pali sources that all show that these two interrelated cultures constantly pushed eastwards from the time they entered South Asia. At the time of the arrival of Islam, this eastward migration had pushed all the way to somewhere near the current border between West Bengal and Bangladesh. This set up resilient social structures and encouraged groups to settle down and practice intensive agriculture.
• Islamic civilization was often spread by Ṣūfī orders in the region. Charismatic religious leaders were able and willing to penetrate impenetrable tropical jungles, thus bringing a religion of the Book to the aboriginal inhabitants and encouraging them to settle down. They were able to organize these communities to take up the incredibly brutal task of clearing dense, dangerous jungle and making it uniquely suitable for rice and jute cultivation.
• And politically, a variety of responses can be seen.
• The earliest Islamic administrations were essentially tiny groups of Turkic horse-lords who were most concerned about establishing their actual power in the region.
• This was followed by a few Bengali Islamic political dispensations that took in an increasing number of Bengali converts to Islam.
• For the Mughals, who are the last major political force Eaton examines, Bengal was mostly a wild frontier region where they were willing to let local entrepreneurs, whether Hindu or Muslim, take on the risk and reward of trying to bring the jungle under cultivation (a process that naturally produced enormous revenue gain for the empire). They thus provided the financial and administrative backing required to bring civilization to wild eastern Bengal.

In other words, the four distinct frontiers of the early Islamic period in Bengal were essentially consolidated into a single line: the line that separated Mughal, (mostly) Muslim agriculturalists from jungle-dwelling tribes worshipping indigenous gods.

It goes without saying that all of this is a highly over-simplified account of a complicated (but always clear and engaging) narrative that is backed by recourse to extensive quantitative sources. Eaton's book is a delight to read, and it's absolutely fascinating to see the complex forces at play over the course of history in this region. A wonderful read.

<UPDATE>

In his article "Islamic History as World History," Eaton notes that his idea—that Islam was able to acquire its deepest footholds in eastern Bengal where Sanskritic civilization had had a minimal presence—seems to hold for other parts of the region too.

Recent research suggest that the growth of sedentary agriculture in lightly Hinduized regions of India will tell us more about conversion than will the movement of medieval armies. For in both wings of India that became Muslim-majority regions—Bengal in the east, Punjab and Sind in the west—the growth of Muslim societies correlated with the adoption of sedentary agriculture. And both regions were still frontier societies where Hindu religious values and the hierarchic social ideals of Brahmin priests had not yet deeply penetrated.

Now in the same article, a few pages earlier, Eaton does note that "in 711 [Muslim navies] conquered and occupied the densely-populated Hindu-Buddhist society of Sind." He also writes more generally about the particular experience of Islam in India:

Where India is concerned, two lines of historical enquiry are discernible, one of them intellectual, the other social. The former consists of efforts to unravel the complex and fascinating ways that Muslims hailing from points to the west came to grips intellectually with India's highly developed Hindu-Buddhist systems of religion and thought. Arab rule in eighth century Sind having weakened and died [emphasis mine], it was left to Persianized Turks to establish a permanent Musli presence in India from the thirtheenth centuru. But what would the new ruling class, itself only recently converted to Islam in Central Asia, make of the land of the Buddha, Śiva, and the marvelous incarnations of Vishnu? And to what extent would Islam adapt or change in order to find for itself a niche in India's rich cultural universe?

The two points about Sind in this article suggest that the Islamization of Sind is a bit more problematic than a simple correlation with sedentary agriculture, but since I know nothing about the history of the region I will refrain from saying anything further on the topic and sounding like a complete idiot.

</UPDATE>

New Swadharma post

A new post, after I attended T.M. Krishna's wonderful lecture-demonstration on the "Evolution of Ragas" in Carnatic music. TMK's emphasis of the historicity of the structures we use to understand Carnatic music today is, I think, a wonderful remedy for the broader problems that are caused by South Asians' currently ahistorical approach towards our culture(s) and heritage(s).

I will write more about TMK's lecture later today or tomorrow.

(How) does history matter?

Much to think about.

New blog!

I've been invited to join Swadharma, the blogging community run by Harvard's undergraduate Hindu community. I will be posting there every Saturday, and will post trackbacks here from my posts there.

Of the tongues of Albion

One of the greatest subtle pleasures of traveling around the island of Britain has been the incredible natural linguistic diversity of this place. Of course, in one sense the US is far more diverse thanks to its huge immigrant population from all over the world (although the UK enjoys that too); nevertheless, Britain displays two forms of linguistic diversity that the US is not old enough to show all that clearly. 

The first is the tremendous diversity of accent and style and register and dialect within English itself, as spoken by native speakers (thus excluding the diversity of foreign accents / variants / dialects in English). Even though there are far more native speakers of English in the US spread out over a far vaster area, the actual variations are minimal compared to the incredible differences that occur in the UK. Why this is the case, I don't know, aside from a possibly doubtful factoid I read somewhere sometime that a language shows maximal diversity within the geographic region of its birth. It may be because migrants tend to retain the language of their youth and attempt to artificially preserve it in some manner; I do know for a fact that my Tamil is more akin to the Tamil of my grandparents' generation than it is to the Tamil spoken by the kids of my generation who've grown up in the fertile Kaveri delta.

The second is the palimpsestic layering of languages, where the successively fainter traces of successively older languages can be found in just about everything, most obviously in toponymy and lexis. North America too would have enjoyed this when Columbus landed on its shores, and Native American influences can certainly be seen on American toponymy, but the near-total destruction of the Native American populations and the extent to which the mainstream European settlements in the continent set themselves apart from the Native Americans meant that the linguistic continuity still visible today in Britain was, alas, irreparably ruptured in North America.

I don't mean to say that these modes of diversity are somehow exclusive to Britain or particularly denied to the US; it is merely that they are much more visible to me in Britain than they are in the US. 

Accents or dialects?

Given the extraordinary globalization of English, it's probably accurate to say that everybody, even native speakers, speaks English with an "accent". It's possible to identify people's nationalities by their accents, and with some practice to dive even deeper into their backgrounds; there is a distinctive Bostonian accent just as there is a distinctive Keralite accent, and I'm sure Sydney speaks a different variety of Strine than Perth does. But within the UK, the diversity is absolutely staggering. A native of the UK, born and bred in the country, will be able to place someone within a particular county, possibly even within a particular town in that county, based on shifts in accent or vocabulary that are entirely imperceptible to me. In the West Midlands, the "Brummie" Birmingham accent is supposedly different from the accent of the Black Country, just a few miles to the northwest—both are equally incomprehensible to me though, so I couldn't tell you what the differences are. Black Country English supposedly preserves some very archaic features of Early Modern English that have otherwise been lost in other forms; all I can say is I'm glad we don't all pronounce "horse" to rhyme with "arse"! 

Sometimes these differences are so sharp that the natives are speaking a different language, for all intents and purposes. Now naturally the native speakers of these languages are unlikely claim that they speak a language different from English, which makes it difficult for us to continue calling them "languages"; I suppose we then have to call the more extreme accents "dialects". After all, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy," to cite the quotation often, but wrongly, attributed to the linguist Max Weinreich. But the fact still remains that accents and dialects and languages are artificial, frequently political, distinctions that are externally imposed on what is in purely linguistic terms a spectrum. 

This was nowhere clearer to me than in Scotland, where the English (spoken by native Scotsmen) varies from "standard" BBC English, to the presence of a trilled 'r' and hard 'ch' and and a few peculiar words like "bonnie" and "wee", to a very pronounced "Scottish" accent, to a language that doesn't really seem like English anymore. This is of course the Scots language, a surviving branch of Middle English, the language of Robert Burns, distinct in many major points of grammar and vocabulary from "standard" English. Scots is different from Scottish English (which is grammatically mostly standard English but whose pronunciation is influenced by Scots), Scottish Gaelic (the Celtic language brought to Britain from Ireland which is very close to Irish Gaelic), and from Highland English (English heavily influenced both by Scots and by Scottish Gaelic). This complex linguistic picture was presented to us by our tour guide, a kilted Scotsman with a barely noticeable trilled 'r' who nevertheless could speak "braid Scots" when needed, and who possessed some knowledge of Scottish Gaelic. This last point is important to note, for Scottish Gaelic, like Irish Gaelic and unlike Welsh, is rapidly fading away.

A Brief History of Languages

The linguistic history of the British Isles is incredibly fascinating, and I've been trying to read up a bit more about it (on Wikipedia, of course!). And the picture I've gleaned from a quick skim is incredible. Excluding the pre-Indo-European languages of Britain (about which we know regrettably little), the major language families to have existed here include the Celtic, the Norse, the Germanic, and the Romance: four huge language families on one little island!

We know almost nothing about the pre-Celtic languages spoken on the isles, except that they must have existed: the great Neolithic sites like Stonehenge predate the coming of the Celtic languages, who were probably the first Indo-European-speaking peoples to cross the English channel into the British Isles. But about the Celtic languages we know much more. We know, for instance, that there were a number of Celtic languages spoken in modern France and Spain, giving rise to the names Gaul and Gallic and Galicia, and that these languages had long been in contact with the Italic branch of the great Indo-European family (the branch that gives rise to Latin and then to the modern Romance languages). Some of these people push off from modern Galicia and Normandy and land in the British Isles, bringing with them not one, but two distinct flavors of Celtic tongues. 

This is a good place to note that the migration of languages is not necessarily connected with the migration of peoples or with violence. A very small number of people may migrate to a new land and quickly become indistinguishable by blood from the surrounding population, and yet their language may come to be adopted even by the majority surrounding them, possibly with great phonological and morphological changes, possibly almost unchanged. We don't know how many Celtic-speaking people came over, nor do we know if their coming was bloody or peaceful. We don't even know how many languages these people spoke when they first landed in Britain; all we know is that there are two distinct Celtic language families present in the isles.

In Ireland, the Goidelic family flourishes, spoken by the early Gaels, while in Britain it's the Brythonic languages. The former gives rise to modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic; the latter to modern Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. One small wrinkle here is with the Pictish language, possibly but not definitely a Brythonic Celtic language. Spoken north of the Firth of Forth (near modern Edinburgh), the Pictish language was spoken by (duh) the Picts, after one of whose tribes the Romans named the region Caledonia. Now neither language family stays put, of course. Some Brythonic speakers resettle in mainland Europe, surviving till today in Brittany. Some Gaels from northern Ireland invade western Caledonia to establish the kingdom of Dál Riata, thus introducing a Goidelic language into the Isle of Man and into Britain. (One fascinating tidbit: today in Scotland, the word "Gaelic" is pronounced "Gallic", but in Ireland it's "Gaylic".) The Romans called the Gaelic population of Dál Riata the Scotti, whence the name "Scotland". The Scotti and the Picts alternate between making war and making love, until the two kingdoms are united to create a single Scottish kingdom (alas, with the loss of the Pictish tongue).

The Celtic languages have already existed in contact with the Italic languages during their co-existence on mainland Europe, but when the Romans invade Britain, Latin exerts a massive influence on the languages, possibly more on the Brythonic than the Goidelic. The Romans also add an extra element of linguistic diversity: since a substantial portion of their army is composed of non-Italian auxiliaries, some of their languages (Saxon for sure) are also brought to the Isles at this early point. Of course, the Germanic languages come in much greater numbers later.

Around the time the Romans start quitting Britain, major changes are afoot on the mainland. Turkic-speaking Hunnic tribes are pouring in from Eurasia, squeezing all the other existing European tribes into ever-shrinking territories. Small wonder then, that some of the Germanic groups—the Angles, the Saxons, and the like—set sail for the shores of fair Albion. Some of these settlements were probably peaceful while others were quite violent; it's funny then that, in a sense, a skirmish between ethnic Anglo-Saxons and ethnic Brythonic-speaking Celts is a fight between the English and the British! (I claim poetic license to slightly misuse the words for humorous effect.) 

Other, more northerly Germanic tribes also begin to raid the coasts of Britain and Ireland—the wild Vikings, speakers of Norse languages (whose ancestor, Old Norse, is descended from Proto-Germanic just as these other languages are). In parts of Scotland, the two groups actually begin to co-exist as the so-called Norse-Gaels, and I wonder what sort of curious Celtic / Norse mixture they must have spoken! Curious fact: the words "Loch Ness" and "Inverness" are a mixture of Gaelic and Norse: "loch" is of course Scottish Gaelic for "lake", while "inver" is the anglicized version of Scottish Gaelic "inbhir", meaning "confluence", and "ness" is the anglicized Norse "nis", meaning "large body of water".

Old English, at this point essentially just a collection of Anglo-Saxon dialects, was thus a very Germanic language that was nevertheless heavily influenced by Latin (thanks to the educated monks), by the Old Norse-speaking invaders (a different flavor of Germanic), and by the pre-existing Celtic languages. A number of Old English words still survive today in Modern English; we tend to think of these words as somehow being shorter, crisper, and more direct. Reading some Old English poetry in the original gives us a sense of how near we are to that tongue, and yet how far.

But of course, there is yet another hugely important linguistic influence that shapes Anglo-Saxon into Modern English, and that is of course the linguistic impact of the Normans. The language spoken by the Norman invaders and later rulers of Britain was (surprise surprise) Old Norman, a dialect of Old French. As with anything else, such naming of languages shows the difficulties we face in accurately labeling and classifying a complex, fluid linguistic situation. To be more precise, the various languages spoken in the region of modern France around this time are collectively called Old French and can broadly be grouped into two families based on the word used for "yes". The more northerly group, into which both Old Norman and modern "standard" French fall, is the so-called langues d'oïl; the southerly languages, including old and modern Provençal, are the langues d'oc. (Bear with me, jay nuh parlay pah luh fronsay!)

The impact of Old Norman and its descendant Anglo-French on English was profound, to put it mildly.A gigantic amount of Latinate / Romance vocabulary was imported wholesale into English, changing the language's style and expression forever. The reason kids who study Latin do better on the SATs is because the Normans invaded and ruled Britain and transformed the language; otherwise we'd be pointing to German as a model worthy of emulation.

I will leave you with an excerpt from a really interesting work, Uncleftish Beholding by Poul Anderson, an introduction to atomic theory written in a hypothetical form of English largely uninfluenced by the Romance languages.

The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mighty small: one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called bulkbits. Thus the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in chills when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike unclefts link in a bulkbit, they make bindings. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff.

The rest of the essay is available here. It's a fascinating exercise to try to piece together what Anderson means, and to try to explain his reasons for his coinages (in most cases, from the Latin or Greek etymology of the word replaced; in some cases from the German equivalent). Wikipedia has a fully hyperlinked version of the passage, which should aid in completely deciphering it.